Check fraud has increased nationwide by 385% since March 2020. In 2021, financial institutions filed over 350,000 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to FinCEN to report potential check fraud, a 23% increase over the number of check fraud-related SARs filed in 2020. This upward trend continued into 2022, when SARs about check fraud reached over 680,000, nearly double from the previous year’s filings. Incidents of Treasury check fraud are also on the rise. To address the increase in fraud, Treasury’s Office of Payment Integrity (OPI) implemented an enhanced process using machine learning to mitigate check fraud in near real-time. The enhanced process and OPI’s strong partnership with federal law enforcement agencies have led to many active cases and arrests with law enforcement.